Above.com Review

[Name Trader]

Where was I? I had all my .com domains at Parked and everything else at Bodis. Back in February I was waxing lyrical about Parked being back on top of their game. I had 2 months where I received almost record payouts (of all time... maybe in 3-4 years of parking). Then everything fell off a cliff and I was getting approx 2/3rds less. On 7th July I received only about $6.50 in revenue, which was abysmal. The day before that I had decided to try Above.com.

What is Above.com? In short, it's a traffic forwarder to your Parking Accounts. It decides where to send the traffic for each domain based upon which parking service gives the best returns. This sounds great. No longer do you need to park a group of domains with company A for a couple of months, enter the results into a spreadsheet, then park them at company B for a couple of months, enter the results in a spreadsheet. And so on. Now all this is done in Real Time, by Above.com.

Who are Above.com? They are part of the Trellian network of companies, who I first came across using their KeywordDisovery.com tool. So, I had confidence in them from the getgo.

It was easy to setup an account. You then go to Manage Accounts and setup the Parking Companies you wish to use from the list of companies they support. I chose Bodis, Parked, TrafficZ, DomainSponsor. The latter two I probably haven't used in a couple of years. You need to provide your username and password for each account. Of course there is a slight risk in this, but given the size of Trellian, I didn't have a real problem with this.

You can then go to Manage Folders and setup Folders for groups of domains. I however, imported everything into the default folder. Subsequently, I created two other folders, 1) Revenue, and 2) No Revenue. I moved everything from the default folder to No Revenue, and then moved them to Revenue, once Above.com reported revenue. You do this by downloading the .CSV file for the Non-Revenue domains, sort the SpreadSheet by Revenue, and then copy/past these into the Add Domains to the Revenue Folder. There is no copy/move command in Above.com. You either Add or Remove Domains, and Above.com moves the domains to the new Folder.

You of course have to add all your domains to each Parking Service individually (even if this can be done in bulk).

What is Maximizer? This is Above.com's inhouse Parking Service. They say that by some complex algorythms they monetize visitors which are poorly monetized by regular parking companies. For example, Asian traffic. When I look at the stats compared to the other parking companies (which is easy to do by clicking on Statistics and choosing what you want), I see mostly very low rates per click, like $0.02, significantly less than the rates/click for the same domain from the other parking companies. Who is to say that Above.com got it right or not? Maximizer provided about 1/5th of my Total Revenue for August. I've turned it off for Sept to see how the portfolio perform without it.

The Statistics are very comprehensive. You can select one or more parking services and a whole slew of stats like clicks, revenue, EPC etc.

How is support? I think there is only 1 support personnel. I usually get answers to my questions in about 1-3 days. So not the speediest support in the world, but I can't think of any support question which requires an immediate reply. So i'm reasonably satisfied.

How did I do? Well Above.com say it takes about 2 months to get your portfolio optimized. It's now been just two months for me. So maybe my best month will be Sept. But anyhow, in August, my 2nd month, Above.com managed to give me returns just below my record earnings of February. So, about 80-100% better than my earnings in June. This is a significant jump in earnings. It was split (in approx terms) 20% each from Bodis, Maximizer, DomainSponsor, and most of the rest from Parked. Almost nothing from TrafficZ, barely making the minimum payment for both July and August.

The website is sometimes a bit flakey. Not really surprising considering the amount of data they must be churning out. But usually it works itself out within a short time, usually minutes. My biggest gripe is that the Statistics Reports only allow you report 100 domains per page (whereas the Reports allow 1000). Also that there is no portfolio total reported in the Stats. You have to add up each page total.

Am I going to continue with Above.com? You betcha! I've disable the Maximizer to see how my portfolio performs without it and I'll probably disable TrafficZ also. I'd recommend to anyone to try Above.com. It really take away the drudgery of manually testing domains at different parking services.

 

[cantstop]

yah

above say its taken care of since aug but the new rule takes effect on nov 15... thats when big g stops paying for redirect traffic..and then we will watch to see if there is no problem.

---------- Post added at 02:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:17 PM ----------

. But I sure don't think it should be mandatory.

I think it could be a problem if they lose their "hot hand" in terms of ad revenue .And I had a feeling people didn't notice this change;why I mentioned it .Seems like they should have notified users of "mandatory max" ;no?

 

[Name Trader]

Yes I think we should have been notified of the change of Maximizer to mandatory.

I'm having BIG problems since 1st Oct with parking companies not recognizing the traffic from Above.com. Anyone else seeing this? Check out your Missing Traffic Report.

 

[Name Trader]

Just added Voodoo.com. We shall see if Donny's claims are true over the next couple of months.

 

[cantstop]

me too

I'm having BIG problems since 1st Oct with parking companies not recognizing the traffic from Above.com. Anyone else seeing this? Check out your Missing Traffic Report.

yup and then you check your parking accounts and they all show the domains properly added in the account with no conflicts.This raises all kinds of questions that are hard to answer from our end..such as is the parking company blocking the traffic ?is the redirect not working right? etc. etc..I emailed above support about this issue and they had no words of wisdom. they also didn't comment on the mandatory max.I tell you one thing ;sometimes browsers don't resolve these custom urls [ww23.domain.com] real fast.

 

[Name Trader]

This is the reply I got from them.

We have checked over the traffic statistics and it looks like there is duplicate/bot traffic coming from the same few ip addresses which are making up most of your traffic.

This may be the reason you are noticing such a variation in the missing traffic report.

What? For 50% of my domains? This all started after they changed to their DNS system. Why should a bot be targeting my domains since the changeover and not before? It doesn't make sense.

 

[Trellian]

Yes I think we should have been notified of the change of Maximizer to mandatory.
QUOTE]

Not sure why you think this. This is not mandatory. You can still enable or disable maximizer at will. If you need help figuring out how to do it, you do know that we have an online manual with nice screen shots that shows you how to do this Or just shoots us an email and we can step you through.

Cheers
David

 

[Name Trader]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but Maximizer is not listed anymore in the Accounts, so you cannot edit it?

 

[Trellian]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but Maximizer is not listed anymore in the Accounts, so you cannot edit it?

Maximizer was never in the Accounts section. It has always been in the Manage Folder section.

Cheers
David

 

[Name Trader]

That solved the problem Thanks Dave.

---------- Post added at 03:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:19 AM ----------

Here is another explanation from Above.com where at least they acknowledge it's their fault now for the huge increase in Missing Traffic. But it's a little bit like wringing blood out of a stone to get them to admit it.

When the change was made to a DNS based solution, we had to change the method that we detect bots by. This means that our bot detection is currently not as good as it used to be when there was multiple scripts that would run checks on the user connecting.

So for the time being you will notice higher numbers in your missing traffic reports as the parking company's are picking more of the traffic up as bots.

PS: My missing traffic went from about 7 domains/month in Sept to almost 2000 domains/month in October and November. That's a lot of bots and makes the Missing Traffic Report virtually useless.

 

[Trellian]

Here is another explanation from Above.com where at least they acknowledge it's their fault now for the huge increase in Missing Traffic.

I am not sure why you would think that this is our fault? There is nothing at fault, and there is no one at fault.

We simply report the data that is available to us. That is what we have always done.

Just because Google forced changes on the entire Industry that removes control away from Domainers and agregators like Above.com is not something that we have any control over.

So we are still reporting what we can. Sure the data now is not as good as it was, but that is not bug, it is what it is.

The Missing Traffic report still servers the same purpose, for you to double check that the domain has been added to all your parking accounts and to make sure that the parking copanies are paying on that traffic.

Hope that this helps explain this.

Cheers

 

[cantstop]

Maybe you could explain proceedure

Yes I think we should have been notified of the change of Maximizer to mandatory.
QUOTE]

Not sure why you think this. This is not mandatory. You can still enable or disable maximizer at will. If you need help figuring out how to do it, you do know that we have an online manual with nice screen shots that shows you how to do this Or just shoots us an email and we can step you through.

Cheers
David

I know for a fact that you could go into the blacklist section and subtract maximiser to a specific domain if you did not wish to use it for that specific domain.How ? because I did it many times.That function dissapeared .If there is a alternative way to do this on a domain by domain basis please describe it !. It infuriated customers to be told "did you know we have a online manual" .A more customer friendly way for you to look at it would be ;"is this clear to customers?" "do we need to do a better job of explaining how this works".Why would you assume that people know another way of doing this when you remove a function without notice?.On another matter that may be of interest to customers.I am publishing the revenue payment policy for maximiser.If this is in the online manual I didn't see it and regardless based on my payment history this policy seems to have changed."Maximizer payout is the last week of the month. Minimum payout is 100.00 for
Paypal (its $5,000 if you want bank wire). The payment is done for the prior
month, so for instance we will most likely be doing these around the 28th of
November and that payment will be for maximizer earnings from October.".It will be a long wait for some customers to meet threshold so this will save you a lot of inquiries I tust. Thanks for your great service to domain community !

 

[Name Trader]

I'm often getting payments under $100 for Maximizer, so I'm confused about what their policy is. But lately they've mostly been over $100/month in revenues.

 

[cantstop]

I thought so too...

in fact in the payment history I can see that years ago I got small payments by paypal from above.I have not got any payments in about a year, but until recently I did not have much in the balance.The response to "what is payment policy " is posted exactly as I received it; in my previous post.If you are using this with a few domains you may not be getting any payments for years under those terms and people may want to consider that.I think its OK myself ;after all the service is currently free.

 

[Name Trader]

Earlier in this thread I tested with and without Maximizer. I earned more with it turned on.

 

[Name Trader]

The Missing Traffic report still servers the same purpose, for you to double check that the domain has been added to all your parking accounts and to make sure that the parking copanies are paying on that traffic.

Sorry. I missed this. So you expect me to check 2000 domains each month?

 

[Name Trader]

My revenue dropped off to half my normal daily rate over Thanksgiving 24th-27th. Anybody else experience this?

 

[cantstop]

I didn't

notice a big drop except maximiser was down a bit but I have been testing pc parking that is now completed so I will be more concentrating on voodoo optimization as there appears to be more gold in them hills .I expect a lot of the pc traffic now to end up at above maximiser

---------- Post added at 03:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:38 PM ----------

Despite having been told by support the minimum payout is $100 for maximiser , I received a $37 payment for oct period yesterday.So using triangulation...it looks like the minimum is ...well ...somewhere less than $100 but more than $ ? .But good to know it is not $100 anyways.

 

[Name Trader]

I thought I'd mentioned that maximizer issue already. But always good to be reminded Their practice seems to be different to their policy, in favor of their customer. That doesn't happen very often in this online world, imho.

I've switched on Voodoo also (from Parked). But it will take several months for Above to test them out properly with only 5% of traffic going to any new provider. My revenue from Voodoo is still small, but can say it's more than 5% of my total revenue Personally I find Voodoo optimization quite tricky (unlike Parked). Many more keystrokes. So it might be several months before I have it done.

 

[Name Trader]

Ok. Here's my figures for Nov11. Nov11 total was 99% of Oct11 (my best month ever). So this month managed to scramble up to my best month ever which wasn't looking possible at mid-month.

The split was Bodis-48% DomainSponsor-29% Maximizer-16% Voodoo-7%. Nothing too eventful with the split, except to note that Voodoo wasn't a full month, and Above.com only put 5% of the total domains to any newly added provider. so it will take some time to optimize all my domains. But as long as the trend is always up, I'll be satisfied.

On 1st December I got my biggest click ever of $36 on a property/financial domain at Domain Sponsor. So December started off with a BANG!

 

[Name Trader]

If the 1st half of December is anything to go by, December 2011 is going to be a bumper month. Domain Sponsor is going wild (compared to previous months).

 

[Name Trader]

By 28th December 2011 I reached my best month ever total, with 3 days to go before the end of the month. So this month is going to be my biggest month ever for parking. It's not going to be as big I expected in my last post where Domain Sponsor had two days where they reached 2.5 times my daily earnings, which has affected the first half/second half results.

Also, to be honest it looks like the 2nd half of December wasn't as good as expected. I try to give more details than when numbers are finalized.

Both Domain Sponsor and Voodoo have done great in December. Voodoo already more than twice November results. Pretty good since they are probably still not getting as much traffic from Above.com as they should because of their 5% rule for new parking companies.

 

[Name Trader]

OK Stats are finalized. Dec-11 was my biggest month ever for parking revenue, in about 5 years of parking. It beat my previous record of Dec-10 and Oct-11 & Nov-11 by 13%. So that's 3 consecutive months of highest ever revenues!

Split was Bodis-32% DomainSponsor-41% Voodoo-17% Maximizer-9%. My best ever revenue from DomainSponsor. I had two days in the first half of month which increased my average daily (all companies) by about 2.5 times (just from DS). Voodoo also still extremely promising since Above.com still restricting it's traffic.

Split 1st half / 2nd half of month was 56% / 44%, but if I normalise the 2 great days from DomainSponsor, it's about 50:50. But to my mind, the 2nd half should have been significantly better than the first half, so I'm a tad disappointed in the 2nd half results.

So now we move on to 2012. Hmm! I wonder what is in store for us all. Voodoo looking promising.

 

[ngenme]

So above.com maximizer, it uses google feed isn't it?

 

[Name Trader]

So above.com maximizer, it uses google feed isn't it?

Nope. It monetizes domains in other ways than traditional parking, basically for those domains which get traffic but getting no/low revenue from the parking companies. My experiments with/without Maximizer turned on show that I make more money with it turned on.

 

[ngenme]

cpa?